On Revolution

Arendt argues that revolutions “confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning,” because they bring about not merely change but “something altogether new” (11). She observes that the “social question”—meaning economic issues—has played a crucial role in all revolutions; this lends support to the materialist theory of history, advanced by philosophers from Aristotle to Marx, which views material interests as the key driver of politics. Whereas the existence of poverty was accepted as natural and inevitable in pre-modern times, in the modern age people began to question this assumption and to believe that life could be characterized by abundance rather than scarcity; this shift was in part a response to the experience of the American colonies, which lacked mass poverty thanks to an abundant natural environment.

Inspired by the American example, the 17th- and 18th-century British philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith reconceptualized labor as not the curse of the poor but “the source of all wealth” (13). This shift brought a revolutionary dimension to the social question, because now people believed mass poverty could be eliminated. In Europe, “revolutionary men” began to seek change in social conditions more than in political institutions. The notion that revolutions can produce entirely novel circumstances is in itself modern, because the ancients viewed history as cyclical; Christianity initiated the shift to a more linear sense of history, as it posited the birth of Christ as a unique event and a “new beginning.”

The “entirely new story” told by the American and French Revolutions was about “the emergence of freedom” (19). Freedom is not the same as liberation, which is a strictly negative concept (i.e., liberation from something or someone). The notion of political freedom originated in the polis of the Greek city-states, where citizens governed themselves with no distinction between rulers and ruled (20). This form of “no-rule” government was called isonomy and was distinct from democracy, or rule by the many (the demos). Political freedom for the Greeks was inseparable from equality: Citizens could govern themselves because they all enjoyed equal rights within the polis. This was, however, a limited and strictly political form of equality, unrelated to equality of condition; indeed, only property owners could be citizens. Political freedom is thus not reducible to civil rights, which are purely negative rights to protection from government oppression; rather, freedom is the positive ability to participate in public affairs.

Civil liberties are therefore a precondition of freedom, not its content. Civil rights can be ensured even under monarchical rule, but political freedom requires the establishment of a new form of government, the republic. The American and French revolutionists experienced political freedom for the first time in the course of their revolutionary activities, and the novelty of these experiences fostered a perception of these revolutions as the grandest and most significant events in human history. Arendt argues that what distinguishes revolutions from coups or civil wars is that “violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic […] to build a new house where freedom can dwell” (25).

The 16th-century Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli was the first to think about establishing a new political system modeled on the values and institutions of ancient Rome, and he accepted the role of violence in politics in a way that would later be embraced by the French revolutionists. He also confronted the same problem that the French and American revolutionists would eventually face: how to establish a non-divine source of transcendent authority for the new polity’s constitution.

During Machiavelli’s own time, however, while the notion of rebellion or revolt—an uprising of subjects against a ruler—was commonplace, even the most radical thinkers never envisaged revolution in the 18th-century sense of endowing the common people with the right of self-governance, i.e., of subjects becoming rulers themselves: “The very idea of equality as we understand it, namely that every person is born as an equal by the very fact of being born and that equality is a birthright, was utterly unknown prior to the modern age” (30).

The revolutionists themselves did not initially expect to found an entirely new political order. This helps explain why they adopted the term “revolution,” which, in its original, astronomical sense referred to the cyclical motion of the stars. Earlier events that were labeled with the term, such as Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, were restorations of rightful monarchical power. Likewise, the American and French revolutionists initially set out to “restore an old order of things that had been disturbed and violated by the despotism of absolute monarchy or the abuses of colonial government” (34), not to establish a novus ordo seclorum (a Latin motto on the Great Seal of the United States, translated as “a new order of the ages”).

Another connotation of the astronomical term “revolution” was “irresistibility,” since humans cannot influence the motion of the stars. When common people took to the street in France to demand liberation from misery, their movement was immediately perceived—by revolutionists and outside observers alike—as being as irresistible as an ocean current or a lava stream. This phenomenon inspired subsequent generations of revolutionaries to see themselves as “agents of history and historical necessity” (43), rather than as independent actors.