Quotes from Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution"
de Evolver Social Movement, el Lunes, 15 de febrero de 2010, 19:28
That all authority in the last analysis rests on opinion is never more forcefully demonstrated than when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a universal refusal to obey initiates what then turns into a revolution.
12
the social question began to play a revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of the poverty, and the laboring poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal.
John Adams: “I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
19
The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were engaged in what turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot or the new drama was going to be.
The plot: unmistakeably the emergence of freedom – Condorcet: “the word ‘revolutionary’ can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.”
Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and experience of a new beginning should coincide.
29
... this latter part of the task of revolution, to find a new absolute to replace the absolute of divine power, is insoluble because power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute.
30
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, that equality is a birthright, was utterly unknown prior to the modern age.
44 Hegel
Out of revolution and counter-revolution, from the 14th of July to 18th of Brumaire and the restoration of the monarchy was born the dialectical movement and counter-movement of history, which bears men on its irresistible flow, like a powerful undercurrent, to which they must surrender the very moment they attempt to establish freedom on earth. This is the very meaning of the famous dialectic of freedom and necessity in which both eventually coincide – perhaps the most terrifying and, humanly speaking, least bearable paradox in the whole body of modern thought.
46
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.
89
It was the war against hypocrisy that transformed Robespierre’s dictatorship into the Reign of Terror, and the outstanding characteristic of this period was the self-purging of the rulers.
96
That the wretched life of the poor was confronted by the rotten life of the rich is crucial for an understanding of what Rousseau and Robespierre meant when they asserted that men are gods “by nature” and become rotten by means of society, and that the low people, simply by virtue of not belonging to society, must always be “just and good.”
Tearing the mask of hypocrisy off the face of French society, of exposing its rottenness… theater metaphors
96
history of the Latin word persona… The distinction between a private individual in Rome and a Roman citizen was that the latter had a persona.
98
… by the unending hunt for hypocrites and through the passion for unmasking society, they had, albeit unknowingly, torn away the mask of the persona as well, so that the Reign of Terror eventually spelled the exact opposite of true liberation and true equality; it equalized because it left all inhabitants equally without the protecting mask of a legal personality.
106
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 the 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.
107
Even where the loss of authority is quite manifest, revolutions can break out and succeed only if there exists a sufficient number of men who are prepared for its collapse and, at the same time, willing to assume power, eager to organize and to act together for a common purpose. The number of such men need not be great; ten men acting together, as Mirabeau once said, can make a hundred thousand tremble apart from each other.
133
If, however, one keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom, the political scientist at least will know how to avoid the pitfall of the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and constitution…
The basic misunderstanding lies in the failure to distinguish between liberation and freedom; there is nothing more futile than rebellion and liberation unless they are followed by the constitution of the newly won freedom. For ‘neither morals, nor riches, nor discipline of armies, nor all these together will do without a constitution’ (John Adams)
138
That man by his very nature is ‘unfit to be trusted with unlimited power’, that those who wield power are likely to turn into ‘ravenous beasts of prey’, that government is necessary in order to restrain man and his drive for power and, therefore, is (as Madison put it) ‘a reflection upon human nature’ – these were commonplaces in the eighteenth century no less than in the nineteenth, and they were deeply ingrained in the minds of the Founding Fathers.
John Adams: “Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion,” he obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to abolish them.
154
The constitutional history of France, where even during the revolution constitution followed upon constitution while those in power were unable to enforce any of the revolutionary laws and decrees, 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.
156
the great good fortune of the Amer Rev was that the people of the colonies, prior to their conflict with England, were organized in self-governing bodies, that the revolution – to speak the language of the eighteenth century – did not throw them into a state of nature, that there never was any serious questioning of the pouvoir constituant of those who framed the state constitutions and, eventually, the Constitution of the of the United States.
157
The astounding fact that the Declaration of Independence was preceded, accompanied, and following by constitution-making in all thirteen colonies revealed all of a sudden to what an extent an entirely new concept of power and authority, an entirely novel idea of what was of prime importance in the political realm had already developed in the New World … What was lacking in the Old World were the townships of the colonies, and, seen with the eyes of a European observer, ‘the American Revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came out of the townships and took possession of the state.’
Jefferson knew that “the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the representative 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.”
241
Had Jefferson’s plan of ‘elementary republics’ been carried out, it would have exceeded by far the feeble germs of a new form of government which we are able to detect in the sections of the Paris Commune and the popular societies during the French Revolution.
251
no history of the European leisure classes would be complete without a history of the professional revolutionists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, together with the modern artists and writers, have become the true heirs of the homes de letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The outbreak of most revolutions has surprised the revolutionist groups and parties no less than all others, and there exists hardly a revolution whose outbreak could be blamed upon their activities.
252
The part of the professional revolutionists usually consists not in making a revolution but in rising to power after it has broken out, and their great advantage in this power struggle lies less in their theories and mental or organizational preparation than in the simple fact that their names are the only ones which are publicly known.
12
the social question began to play a revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of the poverty, and the laboring poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal.
John Adams: “I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
19
The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were engaged in what turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot or the new drama was going to be.
The plot: unmistakeably the emergence of freedom – Condorcet: “the word ‘revolutionary’ can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.”
Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and experience of a new beginning should coincide.
29
... this latter part of the task of revolution, to find a new absolute to replace the absolute of divine power, is insoluble because power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute.
30
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, that equality is a birthright, was utterly unknown prior to the modern age.
44 Hegel
Out of revolution and counter-revolution, from the 14th of July to 18th of Brumaire and the restoration of the monarchy was born the dialectical movement and counter-movement of history, which bears men on its irresistible flow, like a powerful undercurrent, to which they must surrender the very moment they attempt to establish freedom on earth. This is the very meaning of the famous dialectic of freedom and necessity in which both eventually coincide – perhaps the most terrifying and, humanly speaking, least bearable paradox in the whole body of modern thought.
46
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.
89
It was the war against hypocrisy that transformed Robespierre’s dictatorship into the Reign of Terror, and the outstanding characteristic of this period was the self-purging of the rulers.
96
That the wretched life of the poor was confronted by the rotten life of the rich is crucial for an understanding of what Rousseau and Robespierre meant when they asserted that men are gods “by nature” and become rotten by means of society, and that the low people, simply by virtue of not belonging to society, must always be “just and good.”
Tearing the mask of hypocrisy off the face of French society, of exposing its rottenness… theater metaphors
96
history of the Latin word persona… The distinction between a private individual in Rome and a Roman citizen was that the latter had a persona.
98
… by the unending hunt for hypocrites and through the passion for unmasking society, they had, albeit unknowingly, torn away the mask of the persona as well, so that the Reign of Terror eventually spelled the exact opposite of true liberation and true equality; it equalized because it left all inhabitants equally without the protecting mask of a legal personality.
106
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 the 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.
107
Even where the loss of authority is quite manifest, revolutions can break out and succeed only if there exists a sufficient number of men who are prepared for its collapse and, at the same time, willing to assume power, eager to organize and to act together for a common purpose. The number of such men need not be great; ten men acting together, as Mirabeau once said, can make a hundred thousand tremble apart from each other.
133
If, however, one keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom, the political scientist at least will know how to avoid the pitfall of the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and constitution…
The basic misunderstanding lies in the failure to distinguish between liberation and freedom; there is nothing more futile than rebellion and liberation unless they are followed by the constitution of the newly won freedom. For ‘neither morals, nor riches, nor discipline of armies, nor all these together will do without a constitution’ (John Adams)
138
That man by his very nature is ‘unfit to be trusted with unlimited power’, that those who wield power are likely to turn into ‘ravenous beasts of prey’, that government is necessary in order to restrain man and his drive for power and, therefore, is (as Madison put it) ‘a reflection upon human nature’ – these were commonplaces in the eighteenth century no less than in the nineteenth, and they were deeply ingrained in the minds of the Founding Fathers.
John Adams: “Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion,” he obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to abolish them.
154
The constitutional history of France, where even during the revolution constitution followed upon constitution while those in power were unable to enforce any of the revolutionary laws and decrees, 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.
156
the great good fortune of the Amer Rev was that the people of the colonies, prior to their conflict with England, were organized in self-governing bodies, that the revolution – to speak the language of the eighteenth century – did not throw them into a state of nature, that there never was any serious questioning of the pouvoir constituant of those who framed the state constitutions and, eventually, the Constitution of the of the United States.
157
The astounding fact that the Declaration of Independence was preceded, accompanied, and following by constitution-making in all thirteen colonies revealed all of a sudden to what an extent an entirely new concept of power and authority, an entirely novel idea of what was of prime importance in the political realm had already developed in the New World … What was lacking in the Old World were the townships of the colonies, and, seen with the eyes of a European observer, ‘the American Revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came out of the townships and took possession of the state.’
Jefferson knew that “the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the representative 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.”
241
Had Jefferson’s plan of ‘elementary republics’ been carried out, it would have exceeded by far the feeble germs of a new form of government which we are able to detect in the sections of the Paris Commune and the popular societies during the French Revolution.
251
no history of the European leisure classes would be complete without a history of the professional revolutionists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, together with the modern artists and writers, have become the true heirs of the homes de letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The outbreak of most revolutions has surprised the revolutionist groups and parties no less than all others, and there exists hardly a revolution whose outbreak could be blamed upon their activities.
252
The part of the professional revolutionists usually consists not in making a revolution but in rising to power after it has broken out, and their great advantage in this power struggle lies less in their theories and mental or organizational preparation than in the simple fact that their names are the only ones which are publicly known.
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