On Revolution

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1963

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Virtues of Direct Democracy

The difference between direct and representative democracy is one of the central themes of On Revolution and remains a core concern of political theorists today. In the former, citizens themselves decide policies through collective deliberation, in which everyone’s opinion has equal weight; in the latter, they elect representatives to perform these roles for them.

Hannah Arendt was a passionate advocate for direct democracy, arguing that active participation by citizens in public decision-making is the essence of freedom. She argues that the right to elect representatives does not in itself constitute freedom but is “merely an exemption from the abuses of power,” with voting not an act of self-governance but simply “a safeguard against government,” in that it compels officials to be at least somewhat responsive to public opinion (134).

The earliest institutions of direct democracy in America were the colonial townships of New England, where residents gathered in a town meeting every year to vote on laws, budgets, officials, and other administrative matters. Arendt deeply admires these townships as ideal models of direct democracy. The French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, frequently quoted by Arendt, visited several Massachusetts townships in 1831 and praised them in his influential book Democracy in America (1835) as training grounds for participation in democratic society. Thomas Jefferson also extolled the townships for allowing everyone to feel “that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day”—a quotation to which Arendt returns repeatedly throughout the book (246). Arendt believes that it was this robust tradition of active local self-government that helped the American Revolution succeed in creating a new republic, while the French Revolution failed to instill a sense of workable direct democracy in a population with no real prior experience of it.

However, neither Jefferson nor the other Founding Fathers sought to institutionalize direct democracy in higher levels of government, fearing it would foster instability and allow majorities to oppress minorities. Instead, they created a federal republic in which citizens elect representatives to state legislatures and Congress. Arendt therefore views self-governing local councils as the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition. For Arendt, the problem with modern American democracy is that it has once again transformed politics into something more remote from the day-to-day lives of average citizens, with citizens largely delegating powers and decisions to their representatives. Arendt thus believes that one of the surest ways of reviving the true spirit of democracy is to recapture something of the old republican spirit which first facilitated the founding of American democracy.

Poverty as a Pre-Political Problem

One of Arendt’s most controversial claims in On Revolution is the assertion that economic problems cannot be solved by political means, and that any revolution focused on eliminating poverty will inevitably fail: “No revolution has ever solved the ‘social question’ and liberated men from the predicament of want” (102). Some critics have interpreted these claims to mean that Arendt was unconcerned about socio-economic problems, while others have suggested that Arendt believed mass poverty is so self-evidently bad that it does not need to be debated in the public sphere but can simply be managed by technical experts.

For Arendt, ensuring citizens’ welfare was a pre-political condition for participation in politics, because only when citizens are liberated from material necessity do they have the capacity to participate in the public sphere: “freedom can only come to those whose needs have been fulfilled” (130). Elsewhere she explains that “Poverty is more than deprivation, it is a state of constant want and acute misery whose ignominy consists in its dehumanizing force; poverty is abject because it puts men under the absolute dictate of their bodies” (50). A person completely consumed by the struggle for physical survival has neither the time nor the energy to engage in the humanizing experience of collective deliberation and action on public matters.

Moreover, Arendt shared the belief—widely held at the time—that the progress of technological innovation would lift most people out of poverty because technology makes it possible to secure one’s material survival with less need for human labor. Before the Industrial Revolution, the only way for a person to avoid hard physical labor was “by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them [. . .] 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” (104, emphasis added).

To Arendt, it was a mistake for the French revolutionists to abandon the pursuit of freedom in favor of solving the “social question,” not because it is wrong to care about poor people, but simply because the technological means to eradicate poverty did not exist at that time. Any attempt at such eradication was therefore bound to fail, with individual scapegoats unjustifiably held accountable for failing to solve problems that are structural and systemic in nature. This, then, is what Arendt means when she insists that “every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror” (104), and why she believes that revolutionary political ideas can only be successfully implemented in a society largely free of serious poverty, as was the case in colonial America.

The Importance of Pluralism

For Arendt, the most important difference between the American and the French revolutionists—apart from the latter’s misguided focus on the “social question”— was that the Americans endorsed pluralism while the French imagined “the people” as unitary. Inspired by Rousseau, the French saw “a multitude—the factual plurality of a nation or a people or society—in the image of one supernatural body driven by one superhuman, irresistible ‘general will’” (50), and “the outstanding quality of this popular will as volonté générale was its unanimity” (66). The Americans, by contrast, believed that diversity of opinions and interests is beneficial and necessary in politics and society, and Arendt fervently agrees.

Arendt locates the roots of this difference in the nature of the regimes that were being overthrown. Whereas Britain had a limited monarchy in which the King had to respect his subjects’ constitutionally-protected rights, France’s was an absolute monarchy in which the King was considered above the law. Since the French king “supposedly represented God’s will on earth” (147), his will was the law. For the French revolutionists, thus, the will of the people had to be unitary because the King’s was unitary. This is why revolutionists like Abbé Sieyès “simply put the sovereignty of the nation into the place which had been vacated by a sovereign king” (147). One of dangers of this notion was that it led the revolutionists to believe that any means could justify the ends they deemed beneficial to the nation: Just as the King had been above the law, Robespierre and his associates ultimately justified the Terror as an expression of the popular will.

Additionally, for the French revolutionists “the people” meant not the whole population but specifically the poor, and the poor were in actuality relatively unified in their demands, because “what urged them on was the quest for bread, and the cry for bread will always be uttered with one voice” (84). For the Americans, on the other hand, “the word ‘people’ retained “the meaning of manyness, of the endless variety of a multitude whose majesty resided in its very plurality. [...T]hey knew that the public realm in a republic was constituted by an exchange of opinion between equals” (83). In their view, unanimity could easily become a form of tyranny, and took pains to guard against such abuses. Thus, for Arendt, a significant factor in the American Revolution’s success was its careful construction of a system of checks and balances, with the rights of political minorities and dissenters safeguarded from the unchecked force of the majority.