On Revolution

Arendt asserts that no revolution was ever started by the masses of the poor or as the result of sedition. Revolution is only possible where the ruler’s authority is already weakened and the military can no longer be trusted to obey the civilian government. Revolutionists often seize power easily in the initial stage of the revolution, because they are merely appropriating the power of a regime that is already disintegrating, as was the case with Europe’s monarchical regimes. However, this does not mean that revolutions always take place whenever a government’s authority is weakened: Revolutions happen only when a “sufficient number” of men are prepared for the government’s collapse and are “willing to assume power, eager to organize and to act together for a common purpose” (107).

While the main idea of revolution is to establish freedom, in modern times this has depended on framing a constitution. However, in France the first constitution, published in 1791, was “neither accepted by the king nor commissioned and ratified by the nation”; it therefore remained nothing but “a piece of paper” (116) and was followed by a succession of equally short-lived constitutions. Constitutions thus came to be seen as legalistic documents detached from reality. Even in America—where the revolution did establish a durable constitutional republic—the “revolutionary spirit” did not survive after the revolution ended, although the rights of citizens established in the constitution did.

In both France and America, revolutionists were motivated by a desire for public freedom, but it was only in America that public freedom was already a lived experience. The American colonists had a tradition of “town halls,” where they would meet “to deliberate upon the public affairs” (109). Thus the Americans knew from experience that such active political participation was neither burdensome nor motivated by self-interest, but rather gave participants “a feeling of happiness” not attainable in private life, because they “enjoyed the discussions, the deliberations, and the making of decisions” (110) as well as the opportunity to distinguish themselves among their peers.

By contrast, the French revolutionists had no lived experience, but only “ideas and principles untested by reality” (111)—largely borrowed from ancient Rome—to guide them (111). They were called hommes de lettres (men of letters) and led lives of involuntary inactivity. They began to use their leisure time to study ancient Greek and Roman authors to learn about their political institutions, which offered them “the concrete elements with which to think and dream of such freedom” (114). These men emphasized public freedom as distinguished from free will or free thought: “Freedom for them could exist only in public” (115, emphasis added). The old regime did not deny the men of letters specific personal liberties—especially if they were of upper-class origin—but it excluded them from the public realm, just as it excluded the poor.

The issue of the public realm became of central importance during the revolutions. Robespierre and his allies feared that public freedom could exist only during the revolution, and that constitutional government would destroy it by enforcing the civil rights that the revolutionaries had felt free to disregard. Robespierre contradicted himself in his “Principles of Revolutionary Government,” defining the chief aim of constitutional government first as the “preservation of public freedom” and then as protecting people “against the abuses of public power” (128). In the second sentence, freedom “resides no longer in the public realm but in the private life of the citizens and so must be defended against the public and its power” (128); power has thus become equated with violence and government defined as a “necessary evil” (128) rather than as a positive space for exercising freedom.

In America, by contrast, “the Revolution had never seriously curtailed civil rights” (126) and it ended with the Founders becoming rulers, and thus retaining their public happiness. Nevertheless, “the emphasis shifted almost at once” (126) from establishing institutions of freedom to establishing constitutional restraints on government power in the Bill of Rights—that is, “from a share in public affairs for the sake of public happiness to a guarantee that the pursuit of private happiness would be protected and furthered by public power” (126, emphasis added). Arendt argues that, ultimately, most Americans wanted to control their rulers without investing too much of their own time and labor into the public business of governing, preferring instead to devote themselves to personal interests.

The American Revolution succeeded in preserving public freedom where the French failed, because the colonies had already been liberated from poverty. In subsequent generations, however, mass immigration of poor people from Europe shifted the focus from freedom to the pursuit of material abundance. What contemporaries now call the “American dream” was “neither the dream of the American Revolution—the foundation of freedom—nor the dream of the French Revolution—the liberation of man” (131) but was instead the dream of a “promised land” (131) filled with personal material abundance. Thus the revolutionary citizen was converted into the private individual who conceived of liberty as existing only in the individual’s consciousness (131).